Oh... yes... well...

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Emmy asked for a story for Christmas

 and I couldn't possibly say, 'no' to a request like that.

So I wrote there and not here,

and maybe, if she'll share... or it's worth sharing... we'll post it.

Then of course there has been the toy box, which is nearly done.

I'll get pictures up.

But there you have it,

and off again I go.

Don't bogart that joint....

...my friend.

Don't ever say that I held out on you...

Four phat joints...

Hardy Har Har...

I had to stop work on the piano for a bit,

to build a small chest before Christmas.

It's a frame and panel box.

Mitered beading on the rails and stiles.

I'll glue up the panel blanks tomorrow.

Oh... They came to pull the Mexicans van out.

The van was facing you when they started,

sitting in that crater there in the foreground

and leaning against that tree it's beside now.

That is to say, it was better off before they started.

Any further down the hill and I will own it,

because I'm sure it will cost more than those

poor Mexican guys want to fork over to get it up and out

of that wash.

Don't worry...

Soon as the ice is off the road

we'll get a tractor and some chain down there

and snatch that van out of there for those boys.

We ain't heartless.

We ain't stupid though, either. 

  

A Year's Worth, I Remembered the Battery, and a Cliff Hanger

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In seven days I will have one year’s worth of journal on this hard drive.

Why does that not seem possible?

I wonder if I’ve said anything worth remembering this year.

I’m sure as hell not going back and reading through it all just to see.

Then why am I writing it?

I’d say it’s an exercise.

It’s supposed to be. Isn’t it? Warm ups, for the real deal?

Yeah, right.

I want some Ted Hughes-ish cat to weed through all of my whining nonsense, like Sylvia Plath’s, and drudge up enough brilliance to print posthumously… Maybe a business card or something.

Anyway… after buying a new battery for my big lawn mower every spring for the past six year because I can’t seem to remember to disconnect it and put it in the shop, over winter, where it won’t freeze. I did it. I remembered. Not the first, second or third time that I looked at the mower, when it was still warm and springy out, and said, “Don’t go and forget that battery this year, stupid!” Oh no, I had to wait until it was ten degrees outside and the wind was blowing fifty miles an hour and it was snowing sideways and I was already half-frozen, trying to get a heat-lamp out to the poor chickens,(another bit of procrastination). But! The battery is in the damn shop!

Oh, and those Mexican guys I wrote about a couple of posts back... the ones dicking around with the tobacco across the road. Their van is hanging on to the cliff edge, just below my pond… the very cliff edge that I have wondered what it would be like to slide off of the icy road and over. I think a tree is holding their van from tumbling the remaining thirty feet. No, it’s not their inability to drive in the snow. We don’t get snow here as much as we do ice. And there is no driving on ice.

As if it wasn’t bad enough to have to strip tobacco in ten degree weather...

Slightly Introspective

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When ever I roll up an extension cord, of the fifty or one hundred foot variety, I can hear my father say, “Extension cords have a memory. Roll them back the way they ask and they’ll never argue with you later.”

I took this literally when I was a kid. Maybe because life back then was all about memorizing stuff: words and colors and equations and bible verses. Memory was strictly a human trait.

I’ve learned since then, how the wires inside of an extension cord are twisted—spiraled so that the cord will roll out and lay fairly flat, yet with a little added care in rolling it back, an extension cord will return to its original coil, in much the same way a cowboy’s lariat will. A Cowboy could explain anything in those days.

It struck me though, last night, as I was rolling up yet another cord and listening to the pearls of my father, rattling around in my head - along with a vision of an extension cord, thrown carelessly into the back of Brrrre… well, somebody’s… truck, because it was ‘too late to dick with them’, now in frustrating snarls - how there is something else to be learned here… about memories and treating things the way they ask to be treated… and the rewards therein. A parable of sorts?

I suppose that into every corner is swept some bit of wisdom; another way to elucidate the well-elucidated and what would seem to be fairly obvious. So, I am sorry for the re-hashing. It just struck me, and you know how I get when I am struck.  

Manatee and Piano Update

Thought I'd let you see the piano...

and my Manatee...

The piano...

I'm guessing that we all know to click on the pictures to enlarge? Mom?

Slowly, but surely, I progress.

Conversion...

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The Wetbacks have followed me to Eden. They’re huddled in summer layers, just beyond the gates. It’s the third day of the first hard freeze and they’ve come to strip the Burly tobacco, hanging in the great blue barns across the way.

I watch, as the restless youngers paw the frozen earth, marveling at their breath and waiting, while fathers learn from fathers the seduction of the brittle skins. When a verdict is made, they disperse into the barns and I hear them, taunting one another as they ladder the cured smoke down from the eaves: lush echoes of tropical color there inside the moon-skin steel walls, galvanized with frost.

I do so want to uncoil myself from these gray branches and join them in their work, sit beside the fires and eat the strange flat breads and marvelous spiced meats; these men, who have brought the sun and the heat of summer with them in their skin. But I don’t share their nakedness, their abandon. I never ate from that Tree. I am ashamed and there are angels, still, who guard the gates with swords of fire.

The Ghost of Christmas and a Nod to Mr. Kipling

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I don’t really think about Christmas until I’ve ordered something and UPS is later than usual about delivering it, or I want to go and get groceries and, ‘Why the hell are all these people here, shopping?'

…Oh.

Christmas just doesn’t happen here, up on my mountain, like it does in the rest of the world. There are no lights or trees or presents or family get-togethers. Top sides, we’ll pop popcorn and watch ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’, on Christmas Eve. We used to string popcorn for the tree when I was a kid. That was the greatest ever.

It’s not that I don’t want to do Christmas. I just don’t have any reasons to think about Christmas. So I don’t. And then, of course, it’s here and gone and too late.

Gloria is a huge fan of Christmas, and were she to actually manifest, it would be absolute mayhem around here. I guess I do have a kind of Christmas with her, in my head.

Our Christmas only last a second though, like they say that dreams do.

But still, we string popcorn to spin round the tree and bake bread dough ornaments in the oven that we paint and hang in the ever-green boughs. And there are presents, mounds of presents, mostly book shaped presents, but two or three you will find, when you get to digging, are shaped like mittens. And we’ll open one present each, together, on Christmas Eve and one hundred Christmas morning. There are smells, too: pumpkin and wasselly smells, sprinkley and sugary smells and beneath them all, the rich smell of fudge, and you are forever finding yourself back in the kitchen to taste and being told to stay out of this or stay out of that. And there is always snow that morning, Gloria sees to that, enough to go sledding anyway, and hot chocolate with marshmallows after and you’ll bring back your prickled cheeks and fingers to stand beside the fire and thaw.

I could go on and on, Best Beloved, but I’m sure you can see how one second could be the greatest Christmas ever. Can’t you?